All modern large-scale enterprises are embracing the global workforce, both as a means of providing talented professionals with a myriad of work options, as well as actively providing your enterprise with the opportunity to hit global markets. But with this new and ever-evolving sphere that is the international business landscape, comes some added responsibilities. Here’s all you’ll need to consider when it comes time for you to upsize your enterprise.
IMAGE: PEXELS
Communication
One of the most prominent hurdles you’ll experience by far is keeping your workforce integrated across the seas. But the solution to this modern problem is actually more simplistic than you may have thought possible. Communication for international businesses is all about finding reliable platforms that can be easily accessed and utilised by all of your employees.
Skype for Business has been praised in particular for being a seamless triple threat. Not only can you use Skype for Business for conducting high-quality video and phone calls across numerous devices, but Skype also allows you to send large files in seconds via their instant messaging features. Whilst Skype for Business can operate as both an internal corporate platform as well as an external platform, Skype is also highly useful when it comes to communicating with international clients, investors, and other external stakeholders.
Collaboration
When it comes to communication and delegation, you will naturally also need to use platforms that allow your workforce to collaborate remotely and with total ease. Whether this entails collaborating on lengthy documents or maintaining shared electronic records, there is undoubtedly a myriad of options out there that businesses are free to pick and choose from.
It’s really all about finding what works best for you and your team, and discovering the perfect platform can definitely make a world of difference. For instance, G Suite has its pros and cons, but if you’re keen on email integration and seamless document exchanges, it can be a valuable platform. But when you look at integrating third-party tools like Salesforce and other CRMs, G Suite possesses a startling number of limitations.
Office 365 and its relatively new feature, Microsoft Flow, has proven itself to be a delightful and capable solution that allows the easy automatic delivery of routine managerial tasks like doling out weekly or monthly workloads to remote staff. Flow’s cross-platform operations also allow it to manage your workforce across G Suite too, so you can reap the best of both worlds and retain total control of your online operations.
Calendars
Managing a global workforce is virtually impossible if your workforce isn’t synced up to a shared calendar or at least a solid understanding of the regularity of their own workload. For freelancers, they may be accustomed to receiving a certain amount of work per calendar month, and so must rely on an app with an integrated calendar that allows their employers to establish deadlines for specific tasks.
But calendars do so much more than just ensure that work gets done on time. Calendars are a means of uniting your scattered workforce and boosting your organisation’s culture! If you’re able to establish a strong company calendar that encourages employees to acknowledge special events like the last day of a wildly successful PR campaign, local holidays, worldwide ‘company dress-up days’ and the like, your global workforce will begin to feel so much smaller and intimate.
You’ll be providing your workers with a shared sense of family, which should subsequently result in a lower employee turnover rate, a problem that plagues a great majority of transnational businesses.
Drawing on the importance of a sense of belonging in the workplace, it’s worth noting that the five basic human needs as they pertain to employment (freedom, knowledge, stability, self-management, and meaning) are just as essential to remote workers as they are in your regular 9-5 monocultural environment and that any well-rounded approach to effective management of a global workforce would also consider all five of these elements.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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